[Neurodebian-devel] fresh wheezy-based NeuroDebian VM images (todo or not todo)?

Wed Dec 12 01:50:57 UTC 2012

On Tue, 11 Dec 2012, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:

> Hi yoh,

> On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 13:27 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: 
> > FWIW -- I have pushed my slight refinements on top of Tiziano's
> > changes just to make wheezy VMs build -- enh/wheezy-vm on alioth:

> > http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-exppsy/neurodebian.git

> > Theoretically it could still be used to build "stable" squeeze VMs
> > but I haven't tried yet.

> I had a look at your scripts a couple of months ago; did I get it right
> that you basically script around vbox to make a vm, install it from a
> generated preseed and populate with neurodebian packages?

> I have now finally published my Ubuntu live media remastering scripts:

>     https://github.com/nest/livecd-scripts

thanks for sharing -- I bet it should be useful to have a look at.
do you have them available?  what about contributing to
http://neuro.debian.net/derivatives.html#live-cd-usb-media

as for live CDs at some point I have created live-boot
(http://live.debian.net/) setup, but we personally had no use for
them, so they were left not really used.

> What I'm basically doing here is to take a stock Ubuntu LTS i386 ISO
> (for maximum compatibility), unpack it, populate with neurodebian
> packages 

fwiw -- besides out customization packages (e.g. neurodebian-desktop) we
are not pre-installing any real package.  Welcome wizard suggests few
common groups of packages to be installed + we added some common
software into NeuroDebian submenu of the main menu where upon click
needed piece automagically gets installed if needed.

> and manually compiled code, update the packages and re-pack it
> into an ISO back again.

> Then I'm loading the ISO into a vbox vm, where I use USB Creator to
> generate an aufs-based hard drive with like 4G of space (which is more
> than enough, since people don't store data inside the vm anyways).
> Exactly the same procedure is then used to create stateful USB live
> media.

> So out of one master I get 

>   1) stateless DVDs,
>   2) stateful USB drives and
>   3) stateful vm,

> which is good because the work is only done once and I 
> get 3 mostly identical live medias out of it, which covers the
> requirements of most schools, courses, conferences, etc.

> Now I don't particularly like this solution, because it still involves
> quite some manual work upon rebuilds.

we are trying to eliminate any manual work to later regenerate
"identical" updated versions + have full 'provenance' on the VMs
creation

> As you know I'm working on doing away with make install by trying to
> open source and package the relevant bits, so once everything hits
> neurodebian, the customizing work is gone.

> However, beyond that, there is still a problem in that I depend on
> pre-built master Ubuntu images and even though re-packing is automated,
> it still requires some manual intervention...

> I'm wondering how much manual work does your solution involve upon
> rebuilds? (Please give an honest answer ;-) I know it's 'minimal')

I would say it is 1% of minimal:

specify new version + possibly specify the new .iso image of Debian
installer.

to go from squeeze to wheezy we did needed to tune up preseeding,
initial_setup script and our nd welcome wizard.  But I expect not much
(if any) of further tuning for the wheezy-based VM images, unless
we decide to switch to some other desktop or discover some bugs with the
setup.  If we decide to change e.g. welcome wizard -- that one comes
from the neurodebian package, so we would need to update that one
instead ;)

> Do you think we can somehow join our forces or you would see my project
> as completely orthogonal to what you are doing?

I would love if we could join the forces, in particular if you
adhere to the beauty of purity in Debian ;)

but as for live media, since NeuroDebian itself now covers few domains
withing neuroscience, it would be unfeasible to come up with the
'ultimate' one for everyone.  That is why we thought it would be cool to
offload that to experts in one or another subfield, and tuned for one or
another particular purpose (course, summer school, etc) and have
http://neuro.debian.net/derivatives.html to enlist them.

we could though prep some ultimate script which would indeed require
just specification of what to deploy in addition to stock and then
pre-generate a set of most popular images...

> What is important for me is also to have live DVDs and USB sticks, do
> you think those can be automatically derived from your vm?

nope ... or to say -- I do not think so.  For that purpose -- using
live-boot probably would be more appropriate.  Those few things we have
done are primarily geared toward VM setup as far as I see it. And
whatever is common (appearance etc) should be tuned primarily via
customization packages e.g. neurodebian-desktop,
neurodebian-guest-additions

> I can post the links to the VMs and ISOs so that you can have a look at
> what the result looks like...

aha -- so you have them available -- now you must contribute to  our
derivatives page if you used any of our packages! ;)

> > also -- this one uses XFCE4 as the desktop, so things remain
> > fluent/lightweight in the VM.

> So didn't Joey's voluntaristic xfce-ization get reverted recently? :o)

yeap -- so debian's default desktop will be gnome3 afaik, but it is too
heavy for a VM the purpose of which is to have work done ;)  so we
decided to go after XFCE4

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Postdoctoral Fellow,   Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik        